5 Day Tour Of The Peloponnese & Delphi

UNESCO site: Archaeological Sites of Mycenae and Tiryns (1999) Overnight: Nafplio

The first stop is barely an hour from Athens: the Corinth Canal, a slot cut 79 metres down through limestone between 1882 and 1893. It is where the Peloponnese starts — a viewpoint stop, not an archaeological one.

Mycenae is the first World Heritage Site of the tour. The citadel of Agamemnon, the Lion Gate, the cyclopean walls, and the tholos tombs — beehive vaults whose span was not exceeded anywhere in Europe for the next fifteen centuries. This was the centre of the civilisation Homer remembered, and UNESCO inscribed it in 1999 alongside Tiryns.

Optional: a tasting at a Nemea winery, ten minutes away. Agiorgitiko is the local red, with Protected Designation of Origin status.

The day ends in Nafplio — Venetian, Ottoman and neoclassical within three streets, and the first capital of the Greek state in 1829. The evening is yours.

UNESCO site: Sanctuary of Asklepios at Epidaurus (1988) Overnight: Dimitsana

The Archaeological Museum first, then Palamidi — eight bastions built by Venetian engineers between 1711 and 1714, and lost to the Ottomans in 1715, the year after they finished. There are 857 steps up, not the 999 of legend, and there is also a road.

Epidaurus was antiquity’s foremost healing sanctuary; patients slept in the abaton and told the priests their dreams. What survives best is the theatre — 4th century BC, fourteen thousand seats, and acoustics that still carry a coin dropped in the orchestra to the last row.

Optional: an ouzo distillery, or an olive press at nearby Lygourio.

In the early afternoon the road turns inland and climbs. Dimitsana — stone houses along a ridge above a gorge — is where we spend the night.

Overnight: Ancient Olympia

A guided walk through Dimitsana’s Open-Air Water Power Museum — watermills, a tannery, and the gunpowder mills that armed the fighters of 1821 out of this one village.

Below runs the Lousios Gorge, and the Prodromou Monastery is built flat into its cliff, wooden balconies out over the drop. The riverside walk down to it is among the best short hikes in the Peloponnese.

Lunch at a traditional farm, then west to Ancient Olympia.

UNESCO site: Archaeological Site of Olympia (1989) Overnight: Delphi

The morning at Ancient Olympia: the stadium where the Games ran every four years from 776 BC to the late 4th century AD, the Temple of Zeus, and the workshop where Pheidias built the chryselephantine statue that was one of the Seven Wonders. The museum holds the Hermes of Praxiteles and the pediments of the Temple of Zeus.

In the afternoon we cross the Gulf of Corinth on the Charilaos Trikoupis bridge — 2.9 km of cable-stayed span, opened in 2004 — and stop at Nafpaktos, whose small Venetian harbour still sits inside its medieval walls. The town gave its name to the battle of Lepanto: in 1571 the Ottoman fleet lay at anchor here and sailed west into the Gulf of Patras to meet the Holy League. It was destroyed in an afternoon.

From the coast the road climbs Mount Parnassos to Delphi.

UNESCO sites: Archaeological Site of Delphi (1987) · Hosios Loukas (1990) Ends: Athens

Delphi was the omphalos — the navel of the world, where two eagles released by Zeus from opposite ends of the earth were said to have met. For a thousand years no Greek city made a serious decision without consulting the Pythia, and the treasuries along the Sacred Way were built from the thank-offerings. We walk up past them to the Temple of Apollo and out to the Tholos on its terrace below.

The museum holds the Charioteer: cast in 470 BC, buried by a landslide, recovered intact with his enamel eyes still in place.

On the way back we stop at Hosios Loukas, on the slopes of Mount Helicon — the fifth World Heritage Site of the tour. Founded in the early 10th century by the hermit Loukas of Steiris, who died in 953 and is buried in the crypt, it holds the best-preserved mosaic programme of the Macedonian Renaissance in Greece. UNESCO inscribed it in 1990 with Daphni and Nea Moni of Chios; it is the largest of the three.

Then back to Athens.